WASHINGTON, D.C.///February 7, 2007///Already reeling from an 11 percent effective cut in federal support that could grow to 13 percent in Fiscal Year 2008, more than half (56 percent) of Head Start programs surveyed across the United States have been forced to cut early childhood health and education services for America's most at-risk children and families, according to a major new survey by the National Head Start Association (NHSA), the voice of Head Start programs in the U.S.

Like father, like son-in-law. It turns out BushCo nepotism and arrogance transcends blood and follows the family trees even through marriage.

The Bushes have long been America's most notorious crime family, but the Cheneys are certainly holding their own. Among other wrongdoings, the Vice President is currently being implicated in the Libby trial for leaking the identity of a CIA operative to punish her husband for exposing the Administration's lies about pre-war Iraq intelligence. Elizabeth, his eldest daughter, was appointed to a high-ranking State Department position created just for her in 2002, which she left the next year to work on her father's re-election campaign. Following that election she was soon appointed to an even loftier role within the State Department.

In June of 2006, BuzzFlash did me the honor of publishing my article “Twenty Five Hundred” as a Reader Contribution. I had hoped that it, and all the other voices of protest, could help achieve what our politicians could not; bring our citizens-soldiers home where they belonged.

I know it's etiquette to address members of the Senate and Congress as "Honorable," but, in the interest of asserting my First Amendment rights, I do not think you deserve to be addressed as Honorable. Cowardly, yes, but not Honorable.

Beginning today, The Last Chance Democracy Café is returning to what makes it special -- regular installments of the wit and wisdom of the gang at the large roundtable. This one of a kind serial work will often make you laugh and it will sometimes make you cry, but it will never leave you without something worthwhile to think about.

President Bush makes a big deal out of his alleged "faith." Certainly a part of that faith ought to be speaking and behaving honestly. Just recently, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote a piece saying Vice President Dick Cheney should come clean with the American people by either answering a few questions or resigning. But if coming clean with the American people is required of the vice president, surely it is also required of the president, and Bush too, has a few questions to answer. If failure to answer honestly means Cheney should resign, Bush should be held to at least as high a standard.

The "Scooter" trial has opened a window into the machinations of a bunch of crooks gone amok, and it's beginning to look a lot like some in the Bush administration "are in their last throes"! Right now, "Vice President Dick Cheney, lurks in the background as a de facto unindicted co-conspirator in a White House scheme that involved disclosing the identity of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame." Just imagine, now, what and who else lurks in the background! Do I hear a Poppy Iran-Contra kind of "pardon"????? Will George W. follow in his father's, George H.W.'s, footsteps and issue pardons to save himself and his "brain" Karl Rove?